Portable radio receivers and transceivers, such as wireless pagers, have become increasingly popular as a means of communication. Pagers are typically carried by users who wish or need to receive communications when they are away from a telephone or computer, or are unable to predict where they may be reached at a given time.
In general, the user of a pager purchases the unit and enters into a contract with a service provider. As shown in FIG. 1, when someone 12 wishes to page a particular user, they contact the user's service provider 11, identify the user to be paged (perhaps with a personal identification number), and may give a message to the service provider 11 that is to be broadcast to the user's pager 15.
The service provider 11 maintains a network of radio transceiver base stations 13, 14 which are spread throughout the service area covered by the service provider. The transmitting base stations 13 are distributed so that transmissions from at least one base station can be received by a pager 15 anywhere in the service area.
In a simplistic system, when the service provider 11 receives a request to page a user 15, the page is broadcast by all the base stations 13 in the system. Thus, if the pager 15 is located anywhere in the service area, it will receive the page. The pager 15 will then alert the user that a page has been received with, for example, an audible or vibratory alert signal.
In a more sophisticated system, the pager 15 may have the capability to not only receive a transmission from the service provider's system, but also to transmit an answer back to the system. This is referred to as two-way paging.
With these advances, the usefulness of pagers as a means of communication has expanded rapidly. Service providers have encouraged this expansion by experimenting with pagers as a means to disseminate information of interest to pager users. For example, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,508,695 to Nelson et al., incorporated herein by reference, a one-way pager system is used to relay sports or financial information to a pager user who has contracted with the service provider for that service.
However, there are many potential, undiscovered applications of pager technology which may provide pager users with, as yet unheard of, abilities to communicate. This is particularly true of the developing two-way pager systems. Accordingly, there is a need for improved methods and applications of pager technology to meet the information, recreation and communication demands of pager users.
In particular, there are some types of information which are accurate and have value for relatively short periods of time. For example, information about the nightlife of an area must be current, in some cases up to the minute, in order for people to best find the activities and entertainment they prefer.
For a variety of reasons, the access to information about available activities and entertainment maybe difficult to obtain for a person looking for something to do. For example, a person seeking entertainment might not have immediate or ready access to a publication advertising possible activities. This is particularly true if the decision to find such an activity is made on the spur of the moment.
Moreover promoters of recreational events may not have or may not care to invest the funds necessary to widely advertise the event. This is particularly true of relatively small events or engagements at individual clubs. Alternatively, advertising that is purchased may not, for whatever reason, reach those who would be interested in the event. Finally, in the event of a spontaneous or unpublicized event, information regarding the event may only be available to people on the scene.
Accordingly, there is a need for a means to collect and disseminate such nightlife information. In particular, there is a need for a means to collect such information from the various and widespread points from which it is available and a means to quickly provided the information while it is still accurate and useful to those who are potentially interested.